British Conservative Women and the 'international turn' in inter-war Britain

Our understanding of Conservative women is that their political interests and purview was confined to the sphere of the local and parochial, and that the limits of their international interests and transnational activism was within the shifting  and shrinking boundaries of the British Empire. This is the unavoidable impression one gets from the historiography of both the British Conservative party as whole and of women’s role within it in particular. However, in the period from 1918 to 1939, Conservative women began to turn their attention to European affairs and to international relations, even as they confronted the fundamental paradox of Tory nationalism and internationalism (especially as the idealism of internationalism was assumed to be Leftist and subversive).

By the late 1930s, while the vast majority of Tory women went with the party consensus on Chamberlain’s foreign policy and endorsed appeasement, one of the most noteworthy dissidents was the Conservative Duchess of Atholl, while all of the women Tory MPs in the House in the 1930s and during the war turned their attentions to defence and foreign relations.

This paper further considers why feminist historians have found it difficult to have conversations about Conservative women on the one hand, while on the other the British Conservative Party has neglected to conserve the record of Conservative women’s political and international engagement. The ascendancy of women on the Right and far Right makes it more urgent than ever to conduct critical but also historically-based conversations about women’s politicization by conservative parties.